Protester
among 46 arrested during
police assault on March 13
demonstration against cop
killing of
Kimani Gray. (Photo: AP)

It Will Take
Workers Revolution To Avenge
Kimani Gray!

Late on
Saturday, March 9, plainclothes police
officers patrolling Brooklyn in an
unmarked car shot eleven bullets at
16-year-old Kimani (“Kiki”) Gray at
the corner of East 55th Street and
Church Avenue in Flatbush, Brooklyn.
Gray was hit by seven rounds, three in
the back; he was dead by the time he
arrived at Kings County Hospital. This
was a “good shooting,” said NY Police
Department spokesman John C. Cerar.
There was “nothing to indicate that
this shooting was outside the
guidelines,” said Police Commissioner
Raymond Kelly.

Mayor
Michael Bloomberg claimed that Kimani
Gray’s alleged handgun – which wasn’t
used on anyone – was illegal. “I’m
doing everything I can to keep guns
off our streets, as you know, and keep
young people away from guns,” said the
billionaire, as he condemned the
“violence” of protesters. Mr.
Bloomberg, the only gun that killed
anyone belonged to what you boast of
as your “private army,” the NYPD guard
dogs of the city’s racist capitalist
ruling class.

“Blame
Kimani Gray,” screamed a headline in
the 14 March New
York Post. And the
blame-the-victim campaign is on. The
victim, of course, is a young black
man in the impoverished West Indian
neighborhood of East Flatbush. The
capitalist press is smearing Kimani
and his brother as “gang members” when
it was the police
who shot a 16-year-old youth in the
back.

The two
officers who killed Gray, Sergeant
Mourad Mourad and Officer Jovaniel
Cordova have been named in five
federal civil rights lawsuits over
illegal stop and searches, false
arrest and the like, paying out over
$200,000 in settlements. But you can
count on the bosses’ press to defend
its hired killers to the hilt,
especially when their victim is a
black man.

Neighbors
and friends of Kimani Gray remembered
the police execution of Shantel
Davis, 23 years old, an
unarmed woman shot and killed as she
fled from NYPD just blocks from the
scene of Gray’s murder, on 14 June
2012. We remember Ramarley
Graham, an 18-year-old
unarmed man, executed by NYPD
narcotics squad in his bathroom in
front of his grandmother, on 2
February 2012; Sean
Bell, executed in a hail
of 50 NYPD bullets on his wedding day,
25 November 2006; Timothy
Stansbury, 19 years old,
executed by NYPD in Brooklyn for
opening a door while black, 24 January
2004, and so many others. So who are
the dangerous potential killers? Not
Kimani Gray.

Police say
Kimani pointed a gun at them, which
they claim to have recovered. Why,
then, was he shot in the back? Why
have none of the many witnesses said
he was holding a gun? Why has one,
hospital clerk Tishana King, who
witnessed the shooting from her
third-floor window, said she is
certain he had nothing in his hands?
The cops’ story stinks.

And what
about the supposed right to bear arms?
Gun control is the bourgeoisie’s ploy
to disarm the population so that their
badge-toting gunmen have a monopoly on
deadly firepower. This is why we
Internationalists are opposed to all
gun control laws: gun control
kills blacks! Who shot and
killed an innocent man? Not Kimani
Gray.

What gives
undercover police the right to stalk
and assassinate a black youth on the
streets of Brooklyn? Because he –
according to official sources in the New
York Times – “adjusted his
waistband in a suspicious manner”?
Shades of another NYPD assassination
of another young black man – Amadou
Diallo, 23 years old,
executed in the doorway of his home in
the Bronx by NYPD on 4 February 1999,
as he reached for his wallet.

Youth
of East Flatbush neighborhood of
Brooklyn confront police army of
occupation, March 13.

In fact,
the NYPD has at least one program for
stalking and harassing black and
Latino youth, called the Juvenile
Robbery Intervention Program or J-RIP.
As the New York Times (4 March)
approvingly headlined, “Police Trail
Youths Before the Crime,” with
unwarranted home and school visits,
persistent street harassment and
on-line tracking, including inventing
fake Facebook identities to lure the
gullible. Is it any wonder that one of
the targets of the gang in blue has
ended up dead?

Every night
throughout the week that followed,
hundreds of mourners and protesters
gathered at the corner of East 55th
St. and Church Ave. On Wednesday,
March 13, after the city’s autopsy
revealed that Kimani Gray had been
shot in the back, police attacked a
group of 200 protesters who were
attempting to march in the direction
of the 67th Precinct. The cops
arrested some 46 people, shoving
marchers to the pavement and assailing
marchers and bystanders with pepper
spray as police helicopters buzzed
overhead. Among the arrested was
Gray’s sister, Mahnefeh.

We demand:
Drop
all charges against the protesters!
The killer cops have turned East
Flatbush into an occupied zone. The
very presence of these thugs in blue
is an imminent danger to the life and
liberty of black people and all
residents in the area: All
cops out of East Flatbush now!

At a City
Council budget hearing, Democratic
Councilman Jumaane Williams, whose
district includes East Flatbush,
quarreled with top cop Kelly. But
after the Wednesday night police
assault on marchers, Williams
furiously lashed out on his Twitter
feed against “adults from OUTSIDE the
community who incite our angry young
people!!!” So in the face of the cop
rampage did Councilman Williams
demand that the police from “OUTSIDE
the community” get out? Did he at
least demand that all 45 arrested
protesters be freed and the charges
dropped? Not that we have seen.

Williams, a
black man of Grenadian ancestry, has
himself been the target of racist
treatment by the NYPD, tackled and
arrested for the “crime” of walking on
a sidewalk during Brooklyn’s annual
West Indian Day parade in 2011. At the
same time, he has voted for every city
budget since his election, totaling
billions of dollars for the NYPD.
While saying the outrage in the
community is justified, along with his
“outside agitator” baiting Williams
said it is necessary to “channel the
anger properly.” For him and other
“progressive” Democrats, that means
keeping it confined to the safe
channels of pressuring the capitalist
party and capitalist state they
represent.

The murder
of Kimani Gray will amplify the outcry
against the NYPD’s racist “stop and
frisk” policy, as a federal lawsuit
over the policy brought by the Center
for Constitutional Rights began its
trial on March 18. The
Internationalist Group demands an
immediate, unconditional end to this
policy of racist profiling and
“random” searches. But as we wrote
last summer, “‘Stop and frisk’ is
neither the first nor the most
horrendous aspect of racist
police-state repression of blacks,
immigrants, and other oppressed
groups. Cops don’t just stop, they
murder too” (The
Internationalist Special Issue,
Summer 2012).

And note
that the various pressure groups
linked to the Democratic Party that
claim to oppose stop and frisk don’t
even propose to end it, only to
clean it up a little.

The deadly
police occupation of the ghettos is
not going to be solved by asking sharp
questions of cop commissioner Kelly in
City Council hearings, nor can it be
overcome by the isolated explosions of
rage and despair in the ghettos
themselves. What’s urgently needed to
stay the hand of the killer cops is to
bring out a force superior to that of
the repressive apparatus. A
class-struggle leadership of the
unions, such as the Internationalist
Group fights for, would call for a
mass mobilization of union power
along with the millions of oppressed
black, Latino and immigrant residents
to shut the city down over
police brutality and murder.

And that
means not just another Sunday parade,
but surround City Hall and really
occupy Wall Street until the NYPD’s
racist “stop and frisk” is stopped
cold. It should also demand that NYC
officials and employees cease all
cooperation with the federal ICE
immigration police: no more handing
over of teenagers in Rikers Island to
the racist migra
for deportation. Any effort in this
direction will need to push aside the
resistance of the pro-capitalist union
bureaucracy, which never lets an
opportunity pass to salute the bloody
flag of U.S. imperialism and bow to
the racist, strikebreaking cops. We
say: cops,
prison
guards, security guards out of the
unions!

Thousands
across New York City and beyond who
have felt the heavy hand of racist
police violence are crying out for
justice. Across the country, even as
Barack Obama is the first black
president in the White House, cop
terror against poor communities and
particularly black young men,
continues unabated. The bitter truth
is that black oppression – ranging
from rampant prejudice, to pervasive
police harassment to mass
incarceration and modern-day lynching
like Kimani Gray – is in the bedrock
on which U.S. capitalism rests. It
will not be reformed away by cop
watches, civilian review boards, civil
rights lawsuits or lashing out in
desperate acts of impotent rage.

It will
take a workers revolution that
overturns the foundations of
capitalist rule to put an end to what
Malcolm X aptly called the “American
Nightmare.” There will be no justice
for Kimani Gray, or for so many others
like him, until the bourgeois rulers
and their racist police guard dogs are
swept away by the multi-racial,
international working class. ■